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Julia Morrisroe is a painter and associate professor at University of Florida. Looking at Painting began as a way to share my commitment to look and occasionally write about a wide variety of painting, contemporary and historical. In particular I'm looking at this as public commonplace book, a long term project to explore what I mean when I say 'thats a painting'.
My studio work juliamorrisroe.com

Day by Day, Peter Dreher's project

Peter Dreher's exhibition Day by Day, Good Day was at Koenig and Clinton this spring. The exhibition contained paintings from 1974-2013, paintings of a single water class that Dreher has painted repeatedly over several decades. The full series includes over 5,000 paintings.

John Yau reviewed the show back in April and writes

It also seems to me that in picking this rather ordinary subject and returning to it time and time again, Tag um Tag guter Tag is about trauma. In his essay “On the Natural History of Destruction” (1997), W. G. Sebald wrote about the allied bombing of German cities, pointing out that there was little writing in postwar Germany about it and its effects on the populace. Dreher’s father was killed at the Russian front, and the family house in Mannheim was destroyed by Allied bombing, uprooting him.In an interview with Lynne Tillman in Bomb 57 (Fall 1996), remembering the bombing and being homeless as a child, Dreher states that painting the glass is the only thing that calms his anxiety: “It’s very funny to say, it’s the only place and the only hours in my life when I really feel quiet. Maybe I don’t make the impression of being unquiet, but I am.” more